The cutterhead is one of the core components of the shield machine, and reasonable cutterhead structural design is the foundation for safe and efficient excavation. In order to quickly and efficiently establish the finite element model of the cutterhead and then analyze its mechanical performance, a parameterized modeling method based on the ANSYS parametric design language(APDL) command flow was adopted to establish a digital model of a certain type of composite shield machine cutterhead. By applying the ultimate thrust and torque to the cutterhead, the stress and deformation distributions were obtained through a finite element analysis, and the positions where experience maximum stress and displacement were identified. In doing so, the strength and stiffness conditions were validated as well. In addition, a parameterized modeling based optimization method for cutterheads was established by incorporating with the overall mass of the cutterhead as the optimization objective and the strength and stiffness of as constraints, and the corresponding optimization process was proposed. The optimization parameters of the cutterhead were determined through parameter sensitivity analysis, and the influence of relevant parameters on the strength and stiffness of the cutterhead was explored. The key parameters of the composite shield machine cutterhead studied were optimized. After optimization, the maximum stress of the cutterhead, the maximum deformation and the total weight were reduced by 12%, 20%, and 119 kg, respectively. As a result, the proposed optimization method based on parameterized modeling can improve the strength and stiffness of the cutterhead while reducing the quality of the cutterhead. The research results can shed light on the optimization of multi-objective cutterhead structure.